Sophisticated Acquaintance2007

Filmmaker Daniel Kremer began shooting SOPHISTICATED ACQUAINTANCE as his first feature-length film in 2006. He shelved an early cut of it in 2007, only to finally finish it ten years later in 2016. Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, SOPHISTICATED ACQUAINTANCE tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann, a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann. When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process and the folly of conviction. It is also the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship but, most of all, it is a film about individuality.